Automated construction of security integrity wrappers for Industry 4.0 applications

• Published in: Journal of logical and algebraic methods in programming Vol. 126; p. 100745
• Main Authors: Nigam, Vivek, Talcott, Carolyn
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.04.2022
• Subjects: Bounded intruder; Rewriting logic; Safety; Security; Theory transformation; Verification; Rewriting logic; Verification; Safety; Security; Theory transformation; Bounded intruder
• ISSN: 2352-2208
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jlamp.2021.100745

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) refers to the trend towards automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies and processes which include cyber-physical systems, where the internet of things connect with each other and the environment via networking. This new connectivity opens systems to attacks, by, e.g., injecting or tampering with messages. The solution supported by communication protocols such as OPC-UA is to sign and/or encrypt messages. However, given the limited resources of devices and the high performance requirements of I4.0 applications, instead of applying crypto algorithms to all messages in the network, it is better to focus on the messages, that if tampered with or injected, could lead to undesired configurations. This paper describes a framework for developing and analyzing formal executable specifications of I4.0 applications in Maude. The framework supports the engineering design workflow using theory transformations that include algorithms to enumerate network attacks leading to undesired states, and to determine wrappers preventing these attacks. In particular, given a deployment map from application components to devices we define a theory transformation that models execution of applications on the given set of (network) devices. Given an enumeration of attacks (message flows) we define a further theory transformation that wraps each device with policies for signing/signature checking for just those messages needed to prevent the attacks. In addition, we report on a series of experiments checking for attacks by a bounded intruder against variations on a Pick-n-Place application, investigating the effect of increasing bounds or increasing application size and further minimizing the number of messages that must be signed.